In her account of the decisive influence of Protestant aesthetics in preparing the ground for Islamophobia, Jo Carruthers concludes: “because it is a specific construction of Englishness (that itself engenders Islamophobia) that has been passed on, the expulsion of Islamophobic sentiments is dependent upon an interrogation of Englishness.” My concluding point is similar: we will not properly begin to understand the coordinates of Islamophobia until we have critically considered those frameworks—political, cultural, and aesthetic—through which the sense of “Western-ness” is constructed.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory and critical whiteness studies frameworks on how identity categories are constructed.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 522